‘“Are you married, my daughter?”
‘“Of course I’m married. What on earth do you suppose? I’m Frau General” – I’ve forgotten what ugly Teutonic name she had.
‘“Does your husband know of this?”
‘“Of course he doesn’t know. He’s not a priest.”
‘“Then you have been guilty of lies too?”
‘“Yes, yes, naturally, I suppose so, you must hurry, Father. Our car’s being loaded. We are leaving for Florence in a few minutes.”
‘“Haven’t you anything else to tell me?”
‘“Nothing of importance.”
‘“You haven’t missed Mass?”
‘“Oh, occasionally, Father. This is war-time.”
‘“Meat on Fridays?”
‘“You forget. It is permitted now, Father. Those are Allied planes overhead. We have to leave immediately.”
‘“God cannot be hurried, my child. Have you indulged in impure thoughts?”
‘“Father, put down yes to anything you like, but give me absolution. I have to be off.”
‘“I cannot feel that you’ve properly examined your conscience.”
‘“Unless you give me absolution at once, I shall have you arrested. For sabotage.”
‘Mr Visconti said, “It would be better if you gave me a seat in your car. We could finish your confession tonight.”
‘“There isn’t room in the car, Father. The driver, my husband, myself, my dog – there simply isn’t space for another passenger.”
‘“A dog takes up no room. It can sit on your knee.”
‘“This is an Irish wolfhound, Father.”
‘“Then you must leave it behind,” Mr Visconti said firmly, and at that moment a car back-fired and the Frau General took it for an explosion.
‘“I need Wolf for my protection, Father. War is very dangerous for women.”
‘“You will be under the protection of our Holy Mother Church,” Mr Visconti said, “as well as your husband’s.”
‘“I cannot leave Wolf behind. He is all I have in the world to love.”
‘“I would have assumed that with three adulteries – and a husband …”
‘“They mean nothing to me.”
‘“Then I suggest,” Mr Visconti said, “that we leave the general behind.” And so it came about. The general was dressing down the hall porter because of a mislaid spectacle-case when the Frau General seated herself beside the driver and Mr Visconti sat beside Wolf at the back. “Drive off,” the general’s wife said.
‘The driver hesitated, but he was more afraid of the wife than the husband. The general came out into the street and shouted to them as they drove off – a tank had stopped to give precedence to the staff car. Nobody paid any attention to the general’s shouts except Wolf. He clambered all over Mr Visconti, thrusting his evil-smelling parts against Mr Visconti’s face, knocking off Mr Visconti’s clerical hat, barking furiously to get out. The Frau General may have loved Wolf, but it was the general whom Wolf loved. Probably the general concerned himself with his food and his exercise. Blindly Mr Visconti fumbled for the handle of the window. Before the window was properly open Wolf jumped right in the path of the following tank. It flattened him. Mr Visconti looking back thought that he resembled one of those biscuits they make for children in the shape of animals.
‘So Mr Visconti was rid of both dog and general and was able to ride in reasonable comfort to Florence. Mental comfort was another matter and the general’s wife was hysterical with grief. I think Curran would have dealt with the situation a great deal better than Mr Visconti. At Brighton Curran would offer the last sacrament in the form of a ritual bone, which the poor beast of course could not possibly chew, to a dying dog. A lot of dogs were killed by cars on Brighton front, and the police were quite annoyed by owners who refused to have bodies shifted until Curran had been summoned to give the corpse absolution. But Mr Visconti, as I have told you, was not a religious man, and the consolations he offered, I can well imagine, were insufficient and unconvincing. Perhaps he spoke of punishment for the Frau General’s sins (for Mr Visconti had a sadistic streak), and of the purgatory which we suffer on earth. Poor Mr Visconti, he must have had a hard time of it all the way to Florence.’
‘What happened to the general?’
‘He was captured by the Allies, I believe, but I’m not sure whether or not he was hanged at Nuremberg.’
‘Mr Visconti must have a great deal on his conscience.’
‘Mr Visconti hasn’t got a conscience,’ my aunt said with pleasure.
15
FOR some reason an old restaurant-car with a kind of faded elegance was attached to the express after the Turkish frontier, when it was already too late to be of much use. My aunt rose that day early, and the two of us sat down to excellent coffee, toast and jam: Aunt Augusta insisted on our drinking in addition a light red wine though I am not accustomed to wine so early in the morning. Outside the window an ocean of long undulating grass stretched to a pale green horizon. There was the talkative cheerfulness of journey’s end in the air, and the car filled with passengers whom we had never seen before: a Vietnamese in blue dungarees spoke to a rumpled girl in shorts, and two young Americans, the man with hair as long as the girl’s, joined them, holding hands. They refused a second cup of coffee after carefully counting their money.
‘Where’s Tooley?’ my aunt asked.
‘She wasn’t feeling well last night. I’m worried about her, Aunt Augusta. Her young man’s hitch-hiking to Istanbul. He may not have arrived. He may even have gone on without her.’
‘Where to?’
‘She’s not sure. Katmandu or Vientiane.’
‘Istanbul is a rather unpredictable place,’ Aunt Augusta said. ‘I’m not even sure what I expect to find there myself.’
‘What do you think you’ll find?’
‘I have a little business to do with an old friend, General Abdul. I was expecting a telegram at the St James and Albany, but none came. I can only hope that there’s a message waiting for us at the Pera Palace.’
‘Who is the General?’
‘I knew him in the days of poor Mr Visconti,’ my aunt said. ‘He was very useful to us in the negotiations with Saudi Arabia. He was Turkish Ambassador then in Tunis. What parties we had in those days at the Excelsior. A little different from the Crown and Anchor and a drink with poor Wordsworth.’
The scenery changed as we approached Istanbul. The grassy sea was left behind and the express slowed down to the speed of a little local commuters’ train. When I leant from the window I could see over a wall into the yard of a cottage; I was in talking distance of a red-skirted girl who looked up at us as we crawled by; a man mounted a bicycle and for a while kept pace with us. Birds on a red tiled roof looked down their long beaks and spoke together like village gossips.
I said, ‘I’m awfully afraid that Tooley’s going to have a baby.’
‘She ought to take precautions, Henry, but in any case it’s far too early for you to worry.’
‘Good heavens, Aunt Augusta, I didn’t mean that … how can you possibly think …?’
‘It’s a natural conclusion,’ my aunt said, ‘you have been much together. And the girl has a certain puppy charm.’
‘I’m too old for that sort of thing.’
‘You are a young man in your fifties,’ Aunt Augusta replied.
The door of the restaurant-car clanged, and there was Tooley, but a Tooley transformed. Perhaps it was only that she had put on less shadow, but her eyes seemed to be sparkling as I had never known them do before. ‘Hi,’ she called down the length of the car. The four young people turned and looked at her and called back ‘Hi’, as though they had been long acquainted. ‘Hi,’ she greeted them in return, and I felt a small ache of jealousy, irrational as the irritations of early morning.
‘Good morning, good morning,’ she said to the two of us; she seemed to be speaking a different language to the old. ‘Oh, Mr Pulling
, it’s happened.’
‘What’s happened?’
‘The curse. I’ve got the curse. I was right, you see. The jolting of the train, I mean – it did do it. I’ve got a terrible belly-ache, but I feel fabulous. I can’t wait to tell Julian. Oh, I hope he’s at the Gulhane, when I get there.’
‘You going to the Gulhane?’ the American boy called across.
‘Yes, are you?’
‘Sure. We can all go together.’
‘That’s fabulous.’
‘Come and have a coffee if you’ve got the money.’
‘You don’t mind, do you?’ Tooley said to my aunt. ‘They’re going to the Gulhane too.’
‘Of course we don’t mind, Tooley.’
‘You’ve been so kind, Mr Pulling,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what I’d have done without you. I mean it was a bit like the dark night of the soul.’
I realized then that I preferred her to call me Smudge.
‘Go gently on the cigarettes, Tooley,’ I advised her.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I don’t need to economize now. They’ll be easy to get, I mean at the Gulhane. You can get anything at the Gulhane. Even acid. I’ll be seeing you both again before we go, won’t I?’
But she didn’t. She had become one of the young now, and I could only wave to her back as she went ahead of us through the customs. The two Americans still walked hand in hand, and the Vietnamese boy carried Tooley’s sack and had his arm round her shoulder to protect her from the crowd which was squeezing to get through the barrier into the customs hall. My responsibility was over, but she stayed on in my memory like a small persistent pain which worries even in its insignificance; doesn’t a sickness as serious as cancer start in just such a way?
I wondered whether Julian was waiting for her. Would they go on to Katmandu? Would she always remember to take her pill? When I shaved again more closely at the Pera Palace I found I had missed in the obscurity of my coach a small dab of lipstick upon the cheek. Perhaps that was why my aunt had jumped to so wrong a conclusion. I wiped it off and found myself wondering at once where she was now. I scowled at my own face in the glass, but I was really scowling at her mother in Bonn and her father somewhere in the CIA, and Julian afraid of castration, and at all those who ought to have been looking after her and yet felt no responsibility at all.
Aunt Augusta and I had lunch in a restaurant called Abdullah’s and then she took me around the tourist sights – the Blue Mosque and Santa Sophia – but I could tell all the time that she was worried. There had been no message waiting for her at the hotel.
‘Can’t you telephone to the General?’ I asked her.
‘Even at the Tunis Embassy,’ she said, ‘he never trusted his own line.’
We stood dutifully in the centre of Santa Sophia – the shape, which had been beautiful once perhaps, was obscured by ugly Arabic signs in pale khaki, so that it looked like the huge drab waiting-hall of a railway station out of peak traffic hours. A few people stood about looking for the times of trains, and there was a man who carried a suitcase.
‘I’d forgotten how hideous it was,’ my aunt said. ‘Let’s go home.’
Home was an odd word to use for the Pera Palace which had the appearance of an eastern pavilion built for a world fair. My aunt ordered two rakis in the bar which was all fretwork and mirrors – there was still no message from General Abdul, and for the first time I saw my aunt nonplussed.
‘When did you last hear from him?’ I asked.
‘I told you I heard from him in London, the day after those policemen came. And I had a message from him in Milan through Mario. Everything was in order, he said. If there had been any change Mario would have known.’
‘It’s nearly dinner-time.’
‘I don’t want any food. I’m sorry, Henry. I feel a little upset. Perhaps it is the result of the train’s vibration. I shall go to bed and wait for the telephone. I cannot believe that he will let me down. Mr Visconti had a great belief in General Abdul, and there were very few people whom he trusted.’
I had dinner by myself in the hotel in a vast restaurant which reminded me of Santa Sophia – not a very good dinner. I had drunk several rakis, to which I was unaccustomed, and perhaps the absence of my aunt made me a little light-headed. I was not ready for bed, and I wished I had Tooley with me as a companion. I went outside the hotel and found a taxi-driver there who spoke a little English. He told me he was Greek, but that he knew Istanbul as well as if it were his own city. ‘Safe,’ he kept on saying, ‘safe with me,’ waving his hand as though to indicate that there were wolves lurking by the walls and alleys. I told him to show me the city. He drove down narrow street after narrow street with no vista anywhere and very little light, and then drew up at a dark and forbidding door with a bearded night watchman asleep on the step. ‘Safe house,’ he said, ‘safe, clean. Very safe,’ and I was reminded uncomfortably of something I would have gladly forgotten, the house with the sofas behind the Messaggero.
‘No, no,’ I said, ‘drive on. I didn’t mean that.’ I tried to explain. ‘Take me,’ I said, ‘somewhere quiet. Somewhere you would go yourself. With your friends. For a drink. With your friends.’
We drove several miles along the sea of Marmara and came to a stop outside a plain uninteresting building marked ‘West Berlin Hotel’. Nothing could have belonged less to the Istanbul of my imagination. It was three square storeys high and might well have been built among the ruins of Berlin by a local contractor at low cost. The driver led the way into a hall which occupied the whole ground space of the hotel. A young woman stood by a small piano and sang what I supposed were sentimental songs to an audience of middle-aged men in their shirt-sleeves sitting at big tables drinking beer. Most of them, like my own driver, had big grey moustaches, and they applauded heavily and dutifully when the song was over. Glasses of beer were placed in front of us, and the driver and I drank to each other. It was good beer, I noticed, and when I poured it on top of all the raki and the wine I had already drunk, my spirits rose. In the young girl I saw a resemblance to Tooley, and in the heavy men around me I imagined – ‘Do you know General Abdul?’ I asked the driver. He hushed me quickly. I looked around again and realized that there was not a single woman in the big hall except the young singer, and at this moment the piano stopped and with a glance at the clock, which marked midnight, the girl seized her handbag and went out through a door at the back. Then, after the glasses had been refilled, the pianist struck up a more virile tune, and all the middle-aged men rose and put their arms around each other’s shoulders and began to dance, forming circles which they enlarged, broke and formed again.
They charged, they retreated, they stamped the ground in unison. No one spoke to his neighbour, there was no drunken jollity, I was like an outsider at some religious ceremony of which he couldn’t interpret the symbols. Even my driver left me to put his arm round another man’s shoulder, and I drank more beer to drown my sense of being excluded. I was drunk, I knew that, for drunken tears stood in my eyes, and I wanted to throw my beer glass on the floor and join the dancing. But I was excluded, as I had always been excluded. Tooley had joined her young friends and Miss Keene had departed to cousins in Koffiefontein, leaving her tatting on a chair under the Van de Velde. I would always be protected, as I had been when a cashier, by a hygienic plastic screen. Even the breath of the dancers didn’t reach me as they circled my table. My aunt was probably talking about things which mattered to her with General Abdul. She had greeted her adopted son in Milan more freely than she had ever greeted me. She had said goodbye to Wordsworth in Paris with blown kisses and tears in her eyes. She had a world of her own to which I would never be admitted, and I would have done better, I told myself, if I had stayed with my dahlias and the ashes of my mother who was not – if my aunt were to be believed – my real one. So I sat in the West Berlin Hotel shedding beery tears of self-pity and envying the men who danced with their arms round strangers’ shoulders. ‘Take me away,’ I said to the dr
iver when he returned, ‘finish your beer but take me away.’
‘You are not pleased?’ he asked as we drove uphill towards the Pera Palace.
‘I’m tired, that’s all. I want to go to bed.’
Two police cars blocked our way outside the Pera Palace. An elderly man who carried a walking stick crooked over his left arm was reaching with a stiff right leg towards the ground as we drew up. My driver told me in a tone of awe, ‘That is Colonel Hakim.’ The colonel wore a very English suit of grey flannel with chalk stripes, and he had a small grey moustache. He looked like any veteran member of the Army and Navy alighting at his club.
‘Very important man,’ my driver told me. ‘Very fair to Greeks.’
I went past the colonel into the hotel. The receptionist was standing in the entrance presumably to welcome him; I was of so little importance that he wouldn’t shift to let me by. I had to walk round him and he didn’t answer my goodnight. A lift took me up to the fifth floor. When I saw a light under my aunt’s door, I tapped and went in. She was sitting upright in bed wearing a bed-jacket and she was reading a paperback with a lurid cover.
‘I’ve been seeing Istanbul,’ I told her.
‘So have I.’ The curtains were drawn back and the lights of the city lay below us. She put her book down. The jacket showed a naked young woman lying in bed with a knife in her back, regarded by a man with a cruel face in a red fez. The title was Turkish Delight. ‘I have been absorbing local atmosphere,’ she said.
‘Is the man in the fez the murderer?’
‘No, he’s the policeman. A very unpleasant type called Colonel Hakim.’
‘How very odd because …’
‘The murder takes place in this very Pera Palace, but there are a good many details wrong, as you might expect from a novelist. The girl is loved by a British secret agent, a tough sentimental man called Amis, and they have dinner together on her last night at Abdullah’s – you remember we had lunch there ourselves. They have a love scene too in Santa Sophia, and there is an attempt on Amis’s life at the Blue Mosque. We might almost have been doing a literary pilgrimage.’
Travels With My Aunt Page 13